Head Coach Candidate Profile: Mike MacDonald

Taking a closer look at Ravens DC Mike MacDonald and the scheme he runs in Baltimore

Earlier this week I started the process of previewing potential head coach candidates for the Washington Commanders, looking at the hottest offensive coordinator on the market: Ben Johnson. Today, I thought I’d look at someone from the other side of the ball. Ravens defensive coordinator Mike MacDonald very much the defensive counterpart to Ben Johnson as the hottest coordinator on the market on his side of the ball. The Ravens’ defense has been one of the best in the league under MacDonald and this year the team is top five in just about every major defensive category. 

So how has he gone about creating one of the best defenses in the league and what kind of defensive system could we expect in Washington should the Commanders hire MacDonald? Let’s take a closer look

Disguise

If there is a single word that best describes MacDonald’s defenses it’s disguise. Every defense in the NFL talks about wanting to disguise their intentions before the snap to avoid giving the offense any clues and to confuse the quarterback as much as possible post-snap. However, very few teams are as committed to, and as good at, disguising things as MacDonald and his Ravens unit.

On this play against the Lions, we see what appears to be a fairly standard defensive look. The Lions line up in a condensed two-by-two formation with a tight end and receiver stacked to the left of the formation and two receivers stacked to the right. The Ravens respond with a nickel package of four down lineman, two linebackers and five defensive backs. They appear to be matched up man-to-man across the board with the outside cornerbacks matching the outside receivers, the slot corner matching the slot receiver and the strong safety matching the tight end. This leaves a single deep safety in the middle of the field. To further confirm that look, the Lions send the slot receiver in motion across the formation. The Ravens respond by having their slot corner follow the slot receiver to the other side of the field. 

All the indications before the snap of the ball are that the Ravens are playing man coverage here. Each receiver appears to have a dedicated defender, there’s a single deep safety in the middle of the field instead of two and the slot corner follows the slot receiver in motion. However, the Ravens are actually in a form of Tampa-2 coverage. Tampa-2 is a zone coverage with two deep safeties and five underneath defenders, with the middle linebacker responsible for sinking back deeper than the rest of the underneath defenders in order to allow the safeties to split wider and play deep halves of the field. This is a basic coverage that every team in the league uses, but how the Ravens get there is what’s important. 

Having given the Lions so many indicators of man coverage at the snap, the Ravens then surprise them by bailing out into zone. Not only do they bail out into zone coverage, they get to the basic Tampa-2 system in a unique way. Instead of having both safeties deep, the Ravens have the slot corner that followed the slot receiver in motion sink all the way back to a deep half of the field. The strong safety then plays the middle hole that allows the deep defenders to get more width, while the linebackers can split to the hook-curl zones. All of this confuses quarterback Jared Goff at the snap and he’s forced to hold onto the ball in the pocket for an extra few seconds as he processes that information. That extra time holding onto the ball is costly as the pass rush is able to get home and sack him. 

It was a great play and a fantastic design by MacDonald which led to a big sack for the Ravens, but it’s far from the only disguise MacDonald has up his sleeve. On that play we saw a zone coverage disguised as man, but he’s just as capable of playing man coverage and disguising it as zone. 

This time against the 49ers, we see the Ravens in much more of a zone look pre-snap. The 49ers line up with three receivers to their left and tight end George Kittle isolated to the right, but aligned as a traditional inline tight end. The Ravens have both safeties back deep and split to show some form of two-deep coverage like Tampa-2 or quarters. They also have versatile safety Kyle Hamilton over the slot as a big nickel, which would also tend to indicate zone coverage as you wouldn’t necessarily expect a safety to cover a slot receiver man-to-man too often. 

On the other side of the field, cornerback Marlon Humphrey aligns over tight end George Kittle, which is what a zone corner without a receiver on his side of the field would do. The 49ers look to confirm their zone coverage indicators pre-snap with a motion, so they send a receiver across the field from left to right. No defender follows that receiver in motion, instead the defense just slides across to pick it up. That again is a strong zone indicator to the offense. 

However, once the ball is snapped, the picture suddenly becomes clear. Humphrey picks up the receiver in motion and matches him man-to-man. The safety to his side of the field rotates down and picks up Kittle, while the other safety rotates back to the deep middle of the field. Hamilton does indeed end up matching the slot receiver while the two linebackers watch the release of the running back. The back releases to linebacker Patrick Queen’s side of the field, so Queen attaches to him while Roquan Smith holds his position in the middle of the field and looks for potential crossing routes. 

Quarterback Brock Purdy, like Goff before, takes an extra second to process that changing picture. It looks so much like zone coverage pre-snap and suddenly it became man post-snap, it’s only natural that a quarterback would take a moment to process that. The extra beat holding the ball before delivering his throw allowed the coverage to get tight and break up the pass, forcing an incompletion. 

Being able to disguise man as zone and zone as man is quite the achievement and MacDonald’s defenses do it regularly, which makes it very hard for opposing offenses to get a real read on what coverage the defense is playing and thus where the quarterback should be going with the football. MacDonald has layers of disguises on top of this too, with zone coverages designed to look like different zone coverages, such as Cover-3 disguised as quarters pre-snap. But he also doesn’t go too far with it. For example, if he disguised man as zone and zone as man every time, the opposing offenses would eventually catch on and start adjusting their pre-snap indicators. So MacDonald will mix things up regularly and that makes it extremely tough to get to grips with what exactly he’s running on any given play. 

Pressure packages

Another key feature of MacDonald’s defenses are his pressure packages. The Ravens topped the sack charts and pressure rates this season yet lack elite talent up front that you would typically associate with teams that generate so much pressure. That means a lot of that pressure is coming from the scheme rather than the personnel. Just like how he disguises his coverages and pre-snap looks, MacDonald also does a great job disguising his pressure packages and on top of that, understands how exactly to attack different protection schemes to exploit their weaknesses.